riding mower

It has been said that necessity is the mother of all invention.  If so, I think the combination of laziness and beer must come in a close second.  I think the contraption shown here is the most ingenious thing I have ever seen (ya’ know, other than my computer, the electricity making it run and the human body, yadda, yadda, ya…).  I ask you, who has more of the aforementioned combination of necessity, laziness and beer than North America’s redneck?

Clearly, a hard-working, hard-resting, God-fearing redneck without the financial wherewithal to acquire some mad-fangled riding lawnmower contrived this beautiful solution.  Genius, I tell you.  By employing some gears and pedal-power a standard reel mower is transformed into a veritable gobbler of grass (I am assuming, anyway).  And during times of recession this is exactly the sort of ingenuity we need.

Who do you think invented the brick in the toilet tank? Some Yankee do-gooder? (well, maybe.)  What about the beverage koozie? huh?  Who knows what great discovery the back woods will release on an unsuspecting world.  I can barely breathe for the suspense.

by Laurie Avocado

Hemp and marijuana have been so closely related and even referred to interchangeably for so long that the cousins have become a nuisance to each other.  For hemp advocates any association with marijuana activists is the kiss of death.  State level attempts to legalize industrial hemp have been killed when lobbyists were discovered to have connections across the cannabis isle.

The key distinguishing characteristic between hemp and marijuana, both from the genus and species cannabis sativa L., is the percentage of THC, the psychoactive ingredient.  The generally accepted requirement for industrial hemp is 1% THC or less while marijuana contains at least 3% and sometimes 15% or higher.

Due to the diverse interests coming together to legalize cannabis and the stiff resistance of the Drug Enforcement Agency legalization has been stilted at best.  One side of the isle is populated with long-time hippy activists fighting for the legalization of the plant for all uses.  The other side of the pro-cannabis isle consists of denim wearing farmers and suit wearing entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.  Despite the two sides’ common goal of legalizing cannabis they have not come together often, and the fight has been waged on separate playing fields against an opponent which has been winning both wars, the DEA.

Surprisingly, the successes medicinal marijuana has accomplished over the last several years have not helped hemp advocates in the least.  Some would argue that marijuana’s progress has served as a setback to hemp.  One example can be found with the current Industrial Hemp Farm Act bill brought before Congress by Ron Paul and Barney Frank.  This is the fifth straight year the bill has been brought forward.  Currently it is bogged down in the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime, terrorism and homeland security.  The agricultural crop of industrial hemp just can’t shake its shady relations with marijuana.

The phrase “legalize it” still represents two critically different battles differentiated by the colorful slogan, “Rope vs. Dope.”  One side argues that marijuana is harmless while the other tries to prove that hemp is not marijuana after all.  For now the two groups continue to relate uneasily and try to avoid stepping on each other’s toes.

McMansion under construction by merfam

Remember when people where trending on such topics as “downsizing” and “simple living?”  It seems like just yesterday.  With untold McMansions listing in their weed-infested suburbs across the U.S. it would seem that the time was indeed ripe for reason to reenter our housing market and smaller footprints and more practical usage of square footage to be valued and rewarded.  The only problem is that downsizing is easy to talk about and hard to do.

American’s love things big.  As my wife and I have listed our 4 bed 3 bath, 1990 sq. ft. home in SLC for sale we have discovered that it is too small to demand top dollar (in our current crappy homes market).  I thought such a home would be ideal for all the people who have been talking about downsizing from their 3,000 sq. ft. 3 bed and 3 bath houses.  But, apparently there aren’t any such people.  What there are, are people who are looking for their first home and finding that 2,000 sq. ft. just isn’t big enough.

Redonculous.  Undergirding current U.S. home sales, or lack of them, is a symptom of our addiction to size.  Appraisers and Realtors still evaluate homes by dollar per sq. ft.  I realize this is a handy little tool to come up with a quick and dirty estimate of a home’s value.  But seriously.  Any builder can come up with stupid ways to waste square footage in order to drop this ratio.  The 1990’s stand as proof.  For decades now U.S. homes have attempted to find all sorts of ways to bloat themselves just for the sake of bloatage – no practical use at all.

I design a home with practical and usable spaces, small bedrooms, custom-built closets and multi-use family spaces and it gets undervalued in the market because it doesn’t waste space well enough.  Realtors advise their clients to steer clear, because after all, they can find a home with more square footage for the same price.  And we all know that bigger is better.  Well, my family’s is about to experience a gypsy’s square footage, if we can ever sell this just less than 2,000 sq. ft. house.  Maybe I’ll add a 1,000 sq. ft dirt room on the back.

Brigham Young first gave the challenge to the Mormon people in 1847 to spread out through the area and see which key crops the church could maintain and grow in the arid climate.  The Saints tried cotton, flax, corn, wool, hemp and even a brief experiment in silk.  Hemp was reported to have grown best in the southeast and the Wasatch Valley.

It doesn’t appear that the Utah Saints grew great amounts of hemp and the experiment had certainly ended by the time the tax act of 1937 was issued.  None the less it was proven that hemp could compete with most crops in Utah and even succeed above and beyond some staples.  Ironic and sad that the United States eventually outlawed a crop and material that even the Nation of Deseret valued.  One hundred and fifty years later we are finally celebrating Hemp History Week in an effort to bring the crop back.  Visit Vote Hemp for more info.

Yeti by Philippe Semeria

The only question in regards to the death of the current green enthusiasm is, “Will the new green fad die via popular adoption, or via wholesale abandonment?”  Well, I guess this is the first question, not the only.  The second one would be, “What will green living look like when it is either abandoned or adopted?”

An intelligent reader (I know you are out there!) would of course respond, “Well, economical solutions will be adopted while unrealistic and utopian greening will be abandoned.”  And while making sense, this sort of reasoning with the American people is redonculous at best and dangerous madness at worst.  Just look at corn ethanol, still going strong all these years despite its fairly wide-known economic unfeasibility.  And we all know that the milk of the female Yeti could be a financial boon for holistic medicine if someone would just put in the hard work to create a Yeti milking program, or at least learn to synthesize the stuff.

All good fads come to an end.  Bad ones sometimes uncannily remain, but good ones, they always end.  Some of these fads become the next compact disc or Garth Brooks Juice Tiger juice diet – loved and embraced by all, effectively ending the fad.  Compact fluorescent bulbs have reached this level in the green world.  LED’s are currently still just a fad, but they may reduce CFL’s to vinyl status eventually.

On the other hand, some fads fade away like goldfish shoes and Scientology (ouch! I am such a insensitive jerk.  Luckily, jerkiness is hear to stay.)  Within the green living movement there will certainly be many such fads that never cut the mustard. (Mmmm, green mustard…)  A list of undecideds include smart home meters, ERVs (energy recovery ventilators), urban chicken coops, hemp diapers, anti-polyethylene-terephthalate and/or polycarbonate mania, cloth shopping bags, not wasting water on Kentucky Bluegrass in Utah, and duel-flush toilets.

New technologies are sexy, and they can make going green seem Hollywood.  Getting a green app for your iPhone can be a breathless affair, but this is all a bunch of who cares in the end.  Sure LED lights, if made affordably and practically, could once again radically alter energy consumption from structural lighting.  But so could turning off the lights when you don’t need them.  So why is it that buying flashy new bulbs is hip while insisting on turning off unused lights is totally fuddy-duddy?

I, for one, think that this latest fad of green living will actually die a death of wide-spread adoption.  It will no longer be a fad due to being mainstreamed more than forgotten or ignored.  While this makes my dirty, hairy toes all tingly with excitement like a cool squish in the mud on a hot day, I also fear it may not matter much in the end.  If the lasting heritage of this round of green living includes only a smattering of genuine technological innovations clumped together with a bunch of persisting yet questionable green devices, then who cares?  Really?

Behaviors have to change and Yeti’s must be milked if this new green fad is to become anything that will matter in the end.  If only our behavior would truly be driven by economic sustainability and a rational passion for sustainable free-markets, then we might see some wonderfully amazing and surprisingly simple ideas.  These could include wasting less, workable new energy sources, sweatshop-free labor, more shared-space and less consumer-product redundancy (a TV in every room and a lawn mower in every garage).

It ain’t sexy, but it would be a future enhanced by the fad.

Sweatshop in Chicago

Sweatshops.  Sounds kind’a nice as I watch the snow fall outside my window here in SLC, in April.  Oh, to feel the sweat trickle down the small of my back and then slowly spread along my waistband front and back until it looks like I have thoroughly wet myself.  Oh to feel a hard dirt floor with my blistered and cracked feet and to be able to gnaw on my swollen, spongy tongue longing for a cool drink of water.  Instead I just sit here at my fancy computer typing away with a hot mug of tea watching this freekin’ frozen crap cling to my grapevines and tulips.

Surely I jest.  But seriously, in my quest to discover the truth about global sweatshop numbers and stats I have discovered that this is an idiotic quest.  Much more important are the numbers and factors that make sweatshops not only flourish, but attractive.

Wikipedia defines a sweatshop as “a working environment with unhealthy conditions that are considered by many people of industrialized nations to be difficult or dangerous, usually where the workers have few opportunities to address their situation. This can include exposure to harmful materials, hazardous situations, extreme temperatures, or abuse from employers. Sweatshop workers often work long hours for little pay, regardless of any laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage.

Sounds great, right?  So what sort of madness causes these things to thrive around the world (even in the U.S.)?  Simply put, greed and poverty.  Nicholas Kristof raises a good point in his op-ed for the NYTimes from last year.  Sweatshops are real nice options for people who would otherwise live and work in a garbage village.  Hmmm.  So what you are saying, Nick, is that while sweatshops suck, poverty is a bit broader and can suck even more?

A study done by the Wold Bank shows that in 2005 20% of the world’s population lived in what is considered extreme poverty, on just $1.25 a day.  Around 50% live on $2.50 or less a day.  If we stretch it to $10 a day we can include 80% of the world’s population.  This, ladies and gentlemen is poverty.  Estimates say that around 12% of those living in the United States fall below the national poverty line.

The real bummer is that, like most of us, I enjoy the things that poverty makes for me.  I have a connection with my mug.  I like my computer and all the rest of the stuff cluttering my desk.  Even though I like not to think about it, I know that most of it was made by people living off of jack-crap and a cracker.  Heaven forfend, some of the crafters of my crap probably labor for a sweatshop.

So how can we combat sweatshops when so many people around the world would leap out of their garbage pile for such a swanky job?  Well, first of all, we have to share.  My two-year old gets it most of the time.  Forget the complicated economic systems and formulas.  If something is “mine,” then it ain’t “yours.”

Secondly, it is time to realize that low, low prices usually means low, low morals.  When I spend $39 for a DVD player several people just got screwed in that transaction.  When I spend $29 for a pair of jeans a bunch of people just got paid a fraction of a penny for their labor.  Crap, I know!  Sharing sometimes means we have to play fair when we use our purchasing power here in the States.  And the real stick in the eye is that I have to bother to search out commercial goods that help me share when I buy them!  Fair wage they call it.  Sweatshop-free labor.

But it’s true.  We live in such a screwed up world that it is our responsibility as consumers to ensure that we don’t get the best price on a product, but that we share our surplus wealth with those who need it.  This is one case when buying can be saving.  By buying socially-aware goods we can save human lives, dignity and health by freely offering up what we can afford to live without when we are buying the things we choose to live with.

The Harris Tweed Shop

The textile and clothing industry, like every industry, has been facing the green facts.  Cotton, the big fiber on the block, is taking its hits. Being half granola and half redneck myself I can feel both sides of the issue.  My father and grandfather supported themselves with cotton, yet I like to strut around in nothing but hemp.  Good enough.

But as it turns out, cotton makes wonderfully soft and affordable clothing while using relatively high levels of chemicals, resources from the soil and lots of water (during growth and processing).  But, if we know all this about cotton, why do we still wear so much of it, and more importantly, why do we keep so much more of it hanging in our closets and tucked into our dressers?  Most of us keep buying clothes as if we intend to throw away a brand new green suit once it gets its first bit of pheasant blood on it.  Sheesh.

Once again, we can learn something here from our Redneck brothers (I’m not so sure about sisters).  Rednecks are particular about their clothing.  It has to be functional and affordable.  And now, I’m not making light.  These are two very serious considerations in clothing that I am not so sure civil folk understand.  For a redneck shopper these two dueling forces create a dilemma kin with taming the jackalope.

Functional means the garment of clothing should work properly for many, many a donning.  Working properly means a variety of things such as holding dead quail, repelling manure of various forms, and at a picnic being able to transition from cowboy volleyball to goat roping to neckin’ on a blanket (the ideal date, by the way) all the while disguising the discreet bear belly.  Many, many a donning of an article of clothing implies that the owner of said article can’t quite recall its purchase.

And all of this has to come at a redneck value, and rednecks know value.  Jeans that tear the first time you cross a barbed-wire fence ain’t no value.  Fireworks that can’t even blow up a mailbox ain’t no value.  And a beer that can’t make life look better certainly ain’t of no value.  Clothing is to render its promised service, to cloth the naked form and allow said form to function in an hostile environment without suffering undue harm.

A brand name isn’t worth anything more than that very promise of function.  A redneck might pay considerably to attain that function, but too much, and the brand risks looking disingenuous.  Because, after all, Adam and Eve got on just fine in the raw, and if it comes down to it, I reckon I can to.  And that is the bottom line, isn’t it?  Clothes should serve a function, and if style happens to be a derivative of that function, then fine.  But no self-respecting redneck would be caught dead with a closet full of brand names knowing he came into the world, and he would go out, in nothing but his God-given birthday suit.

by Alfred T. Palmer

Environmental racism has been coined as an expression describing any policy, practice, or regulation that negatively affects the environment of low-income people.  Everyone seems to acknowledge that the poor get the short end of the stick when it comes to negative environmental impacts, but at the same time the broad assumption is made that low-income people simply don’t care about the environment.

Now if I were to say that poor people hate the earth then you would probably cry foul and fill the comment box at the end of this post with vitriol and lingual excrement.  But if we are honest, yes, the majority of us well-to-dos operate under a low-level yet constant assumption that low-income individuals (whether rednecks, urban minorities or simply blue-collar) don’t care about issues of sustainability.  These assumptions have been built on a long tradition of alienating all brands of low-income folk with hoity-toity environmental clubs and lofty policies built on negative reinforcement.  What do I mean?

Well, what kind of self-respecting immigrant or redneck would want to join the Sierra Club? or would even be allowed.  (I am sure they would be allowed, even if it was assumed they were too poor and dumb to seek legal council, but I am making a point.)  When was the last time an environmental activist approached a farmer with a solution to or alternative to an environmentally harmful product/practice?  Seriously, it should not take a Green Peace genius to figure out why “putting food on the table” has become the battle cry of the rural working man in America when confronted with talk about environmentalism.

The bottom line has been that low-income people in the U.S. have long felt that nature has been elevated above them in importance – that the rainforest and spotted owls matter more than poor people.  Who among us would care about duel flush-toilets when we are, after all, having trouble “putting food on the table.”  And so sustainability is ultimately an issue of social justice, and most Americans, whether poor or rich, care about justice.  It is just that we take a different view of the subject.

I strongly believe that low-income, blue-collar America cares just as much for the sustainability of life on earth as snooty-white-collar America.  It’s just that their solutions are less flashy and tend to focus on family and community.  Plus, they don’t have as much time to blog about it.

I don’t know about you, but I would like to know more about the genius behind the modern hemp movement.  Besides I have questions like, “Why is noone currently following through with or continuing to build on Osburn’s work from 17 years ago?”  And more importantly, “What the frick happened to this guy?” (He is apparently a guy.)  Well, this is what I have found so far.

Lynn and his wife Judy were living on their ranch in Ventura, California.  (Is the suspense building yet?)  Well, on September 28th, 2001 they got busted by the DEA for growing 270 marijuana plants that the state of California had declared legal for the use of the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center, a medicinal marijuana co-op.  The crop was for the treatment of some 960 registered patients.

Eventually they were let of, but then busted again a year later for a smaller crop.  This time Judy was sentenced to a year of probation while Lynn was sentenced to a year in prison for a gun charge.  This was in April of 2004.  Lynn would have been released in 2005, but the trail runs cold here.  If anyone else knows what happened to Lynn Osburn I would appreciate a tip.

To an extent this satisfies me.  It makes sense that Lynn Osburn would not be publishing research on hemp while in prison or under fire from the DEA.  But who was this guy before the bust?  What sort of degree or background led him into hemp research?  What was he doing between 1993 and 2001?  And most importantly, why is everyone so willing to quote his 17 year old papers as the truth about hemp, while no current researchers seem to be following up on and continuing his work?  I want his stuff to be true, but that doesn’t make him anything more than a dreamer like me.

The answer, of course, is nobody knows.  But I have to write about something, so… let’s say… meaningful and fulfilling lives.  But first, where are they moving?  States like Texas have had a positive population gain over the last couple of years mostly due to strong energy sector jobs.  But let’s face it.  As an former resident of Texas, I realize not everyone wants to move to the armpit of hell, Houston.

Many are decrying the fact that young people are fleeing the country like scripted drama from prime time television.  But just like prime time TV, there are pockets of CSI, er, young people still finding home in the country.  Others, like a recent Wall Street Journal article, talk about the opposite trend.

The Journal’s story is entitled, “Green Acres is the place to be,” and it represents the perspective that people are migrating back to the country.  ”Motivations can vary, but typically there are three groups: young people buying land as an asset or investment, with vague hopes to live on it someday; exurban commuters who have jobs in big towns or cities but want to escape the sprawl; and back-to-the-land types who want to dabble in hobby farming.”

Honestly, if i were a God-fearing country boy, I would have to admit that the Wall Street Journal doesn’t make these folk sound very appealing.  Land speculators, commuters and hobby-farmers sound like the sort of people I would harass with bottle rockets or small arms fire, or perhaps some mailbox baseball. All said, it seems obvious that young people are leaving Rural America.  This is not exactly a new trend.  The recent book, Hollowing Out the Middle, addressed this issue in candid detail.  A splendid blog, Reimagine Rural, also dedicates much time and energy to the topic.

While most movement is out of the country and toward the city, there is a significant movement in the opposite direction.  While many of those individuals moving back to the country may not be representing country folks’ interests, I believe that some are.  Because of the longevity of the trend to flee the country many God-fearing country boys and girls are waking up every morning to the sounds of honking, train whistles and sirens.  With the help of a dream-crushing economy, many of these country-gone-city folk are also waking back up to their childhood memories of a simpler life.  By simpler I mean more straight forward: no gym fees, no commuter traffic, no HOA fees.

I see these folk as not so much pretenders or redneck wanna’bes, but rather prodigals returning home.  After spending so much of their formative years desiring nothing more than escape from a provincial life, now they wonder if the city was a harpy, a siren luring them to destruction.  After all, if you are going to be unemployed, why not be unemployed back home surrounded by family and homegrown food and cheap property prices.  But seriously, some of these people are returning to the country with actual skills and a passion to make Rural America great again.

The question still remains on where they will end up.  Certainly things like broadband and coffee shops will play a part.  More importantly, where will they find open arms and a welcome embrace?  Which small towns will decide that the Prodigal deserves a fatted calf after all?